It took only days before California’s legislators reacted to the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy with a fusillade of bills designed to take California closer to Democratic leaders’ unstated but obvious goal: making it essentially illegal for Californians to own firearms.

I write “essentially” because the strategy isn’t to ban guns outright, but to mire ownership in so many layers of regulation that owning a gun becomes even more frustrating and costly than operating a business in this state. Legislators aren’t stupid. Direct assaults on gun ownership generate pushback, but killing this constitutional right through a thousand cuts is less confrontational.

California already has the toughest gun regulations of any state, yet legislators (including a Republican) have introduced a long list of new proposals at news conferences where they used the Connecticut tragedy to grandstand.

The Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in fiscal 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in cash and paid $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to official data published by Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration also released new data revealing that the number of workers collecting disability benefits hit a record 8,827,795 in December–up from 8,805,353 in November.

The overall number of Social Security program beneficiaries—including retired workers, dependent family members and survivors and disabled workers and their dependent family members—also hit a record in December, climbing from 56,658,978 in November to 56,758,185 in December.

A new study, published in Human and Experimental Toxicology, a peer-reviewed journal indexed by the National Library of Medicine, analyzed more than 38,000 reports of infant hospitalizations and deaths following vaccinations.[1] Researchers found statistically significant correlations between the number of vaccine doses administered to infants and infant hospitalization and mortality rates: babies who receive the most vaccines tend to have higher (worse) hospitalization and death rates.

Infants who received 2 vaccines simultaneously were significantly less likely to be hospitalized than infants who received 3 or more vaccines at the same time. Infants who received 3 vaccines simultaneously were significantly less likely to be hospitalized than infants who received 4 or more vaccines at the same time. Babies who received 6, 7, or 8 vaccines during a single pediatric well-baby visit were the most likely to be hospitalized following their injections. In fact,the hospitalization rate increased linearly from 11.0% for infants receiving 2 vaccine doses to 23.5% for infants receiving 8 vaccine doses.

The authors of the study, Dr. Gary Goldman and Neil Z. Miller, also discovered that younger infants were significantly more likely to be hospitalized after receiving vaccinations than older infants. In addition, infants who received 5-8 vaccines simultaneously were significantly more likely to die following their shots than infants who received 1-4 vaccines simultaneously.

Several factors could contribute to whether an infant will have an adverse reaction to vaccines, including a genetic predisposition, illness (which may be a contraindication to vaccineadministration), quality of vaccines (which can vary by manufacturing methods), and sensitivity to one or more vaccine components. Some infants might be more likely to experience an adverse reaction due to biochemical or synergistic toxicity associated with concurrent administration of multiple vaccines.

In 1990, infants received a total of 15 vaccine doses prior to their first year of life. By 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended 26 vaccine doses for infants: 3 DTaP, 3 polio, 3 Hib, 3 hepatitis B, 3 pneumococcal, 3 rotavirus, and 2 influenza vaccines.

The CDC’s Childhood Immunization Schedule Was Not Tested for Safety, Lacks Scientific Veracity:

While each childhood vaccine has individually undergone clinical trials to assess safety, studies have not been conducted to determine the safety (or efficacy) of combining vaccines during a single physician visit as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines. For example, 2-, 4-, and 6-month-old infants are expected to receive vaccines for polio, hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, rotavirus, Haemophilus influenzae type B, and pneumococcal, all during a single well-baby visit – even though this combination of 8 vaccines was never tested in clinical trials.

Although the CDC’s recommended childhood immunization schedule a) requires infants to receive up to 8 vaccines simultaneously, b) affects millions of infants annually, and c) was never scientifically tested for safety, the CDC had prior knowledge that combining chemical substances, including prescribed pharmaceuticals, “can produce health consequences that are additive, synergistic, antagonistic, or can potentiate the response expected from individual component exposures.”[2]

Administering 6, 7, or 8 vaccine doses to an infant during a single physician visit may certainly be more convenient for parents — rather than making additional trips to the doctor’s office — but evidence of a positive association between infant adverse reactions and the number of vaccine doses administered confirms that vaccine safety must remain the highest priority.

On Monday Piers Morgan attempted to divert attention away from a petition to deport him by tweeting about the murder of two firefighters.

“I don’t care about petition to deport me. I do care about poor NY firefighters murdered/injured with an assault weapon today,” the CNN host tweeted.

The man suspected in the murders was an ex-convict who had served time for killing his grandmother with a hammer. Ex-convicts are prevented by law from owning firearms. News reports said he used a rifle to shoot the firefighters. Anti-Second Amendment advocates like Piers Morgan are fond of using the term “assault weapon” to describe any firearm.

Strict gun laws like the 1994 Crime Act and Clinton’s federal assault weapons ban did not reduce crime and would not have prevented the murders in New York. “Criminals get their guns from the black market and stealing and not from federally licensed dealers,” Kelly Whitley of the NRA said in 2002, two years before the federal ban on so-called assault weapons expired.

More than 60,000 people have signed the petition to deport Morgan posted on the White House website by Infowars.com on Friday.

The Obama administration has promised to address all petitions receiving over 25,000 signatures within a 30 day period. The Infowars.com petition received that number within 48 hours.

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A GM salmon which grows twice as fast as ordinary fish could become the first genetically-modified animal in the world to be declared officially safe to eat, after America’s powerful food-safety watchdog ruled it posed no major health or environmental risks.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it could not find any valid scientific reasons to ban the production of GM Atlantic salmon engineered with extra genes from two other fish species – a decision that could soon lead to its commercial production.

The verdict clears one of the last remaining hurdles for GM salmon to be lawfully sold and eaten in the US and will put pressure on salmon producers in Britain and Europe to follow suit.

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Seasons greeting from your old friend Santa! My, my, Christmas is [today], and everyone here at the North Pole can’t wait to deliver presents to all you nice boys and girls this year. Yes, Jolly ol’ St. Nicholas hopes you’re all being as good as can be!

But today, Santa would like to tell you all about something very naughty, something very, very naughty indeed. Dear children, have you not heard? Why, 9/11 was an inside job! Oh, ho, ho, my, yes it was!

I mean, look at the facts, boys and girls! We already know the Bush administration was itching to go to war in Iraq, now, don’t we? Yes, indeed we do, my darling ones! The Downing Street memo proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Then you look at the Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, the one headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Ignored! Why, children, they threw that briefing aside like used wrapping paper on Christmas morning, didn’t they?

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Editor’s note: On the Alex Jones Show today, guest David Icke pointed out the occult significance of releasing this image at the solstice.

NASA’s Casini spacecraft has caught a rare glimpse of Saturn in near-perfect conditions for one of the first times in its eight years orbiting the ringed planet.

The image shows the gas giant in “high solar phase” — a point in the planet’s shadow with the sun completely obscured.

“Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those taken from Saturn’s shadow,” Carolyn Porco, head of Cassini’s imaging team in Boulder, Colo., said in a release.